A friend just emailed me this command this morning and I think its a very cool, quick and easy way to see the weather on your Mac computer.

Sure you can fire up your web browser, go to Google and type in the name of your city and weather, but this is more fun.

If you would like to know the temperature for Townsville and you have a mac computer, all you need to do is go to your terminal terminal and type in,

finger [email protected] and you will get the following display.

The quick terminal command will instantly give you a no mess no fuss, to your current weather and temperature through out the day including wind speeds.

What is Terminal

The Terminal program on your Mac is just any pother application you use.

In a nut shell, the Terminal is a small, light, fast black and white screen you see in the movies which criminals use to hack into computers and such. It is basically a way of doing things on your computer without a mouse and typing your commands rather than click on GUI’s (Graphical User Interface).

By typing in what you want to do into the Terminal, you do not need to navigate all over your computer by click into different windows and directories, which can be very handy.

What is the finger command

The finger command is used to find, or ask for information from a computer. It could be information about a user, a system or in this case weather information.

The format always includes the finger command at the beginning of the statement followed by its exceptions.

The finger command was really big when on campuses in the 90’s when students started getting internet access. If it wasn’t blocked you were able to find a little information about someone with their email address.

This might not sound very exciting now, but then it was a big deal and these little things built the foundation of the internet we all use and enjoy today.

Some basic Terminal Commands

ls -l gives you a list of files and information regarding size and permissions in the current directory you are in.

cd allows you to change directories. If you are in Pictures and want to go to movies you might type cd movies.

who – for people with multiple people and accounts on their mac will list information about who logged onto it.

clear – will remove all the previous commands when things start to get messy and you want to clear it up.

cd.. will take you back a directory, up the tree or directory.

mkdir will make a new directory. Eg mkdir Ross will create a new directory called ross in your current location.

rm followed by file name will remove the file or directory.